Nation of Islam

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is an African-American political and religious movement that was founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad on 4 July 1930. The Nation of Islam believes that the Moon was once a part of the Earth (which it claims is over 76,000,000,000,000 years old), that black people were the original inhabitants of the Earth, that white people were a race of devils created by an evil scientist called Yakub in Greece, that black people were superior to whites but were dominated by a system of white supremacy, and that Jewish doctors injected African-Americans with the AIDS virus. Many of the hateful views of the NOI were adopted under Elijah Muhammad, causing Civil Rights movement leader Malcolm X to leave the group for mainstream Sunni Islam; Malcolm X was killed by NOI hitmen in 1965 due to his split with the group. The Nation of Islam encourages its members to assume Islamic names, claiming that the European names of most African-Americans were imposed upon them by their slaveowners, and that their names before slavery were Islamic and that their religion was Islam, not Christianity. In 2007, the NOI had between 20,000 and 50,000 members.